Lyme With a Side—or Two—of Babesia: The Most Common Co-Infection that is Frequently Missed

Babesia parasites inside red blood cell
By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Written by: Wendy Adams, Research Grant Director & Advisory Board Member, Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll have learned that tick-borne diseases are on the rise across the United States. Many theories exist as to why this is the case. However, most scientists that study ticks and their habitats agree that a combination of reasons—including climate change and human encroachment into tick habitats—are at least partially to blame.

Although Lyme disease (caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi) is the most common disease that humans acquire from tick bites, ticks can unfortunately transmit several other bacteria, viruses, and parasites to humans. Multiple infections can even be transmitted during the same bite. The confusing and overlapping disease symptoms caused by multiple infections makes it extremely difficult for doctors to recognize, diagnose and treat the different infections.

Summer Camp in Lyme Land

By Bay Area Lyme

Lia GaertnerThe following is a guest post by one of our esteemed Advisory Board members, Lia Gaertner. Lia is a scientist and also a Lyme patient who has turned her own frustrating experience with the disease into a personal mission to help create greater awareness and understanding about the illness. This year’s explosion in tick counts all over the country necessitates extra vigilance for all of us who enjoy the outdoors. Here, Lia shares some of her family’s precautions.

I am proud to serve as a member of the science team at the Bay Area Lyme Foundation (BAL).  As a survivor of two severe Lyme infections on both the East and West coasts of the USA, I know quite a bit about ticks and tick-borne infections. During my twelve-year struggle with Lyme and babesia infections, my physician husband and I had to educate ourselves about ticks and tick-borne infections by going to medical conferences, studying with doctors, reading scientific literature, and mostly by experimenting with dozens of tests and therapies (on me). Now, we both receive daily requests from desperate people who cannot find sufficient information on how to treat their tick bite or tick-borne infections.